Generational
Shift
Assessing the impact on
an organisation
Jon Chidley
Generational shift
Generational Shift: Assessing the impact on an organisation
Abstract: The “generational shift” from a workforce that is retiring and taking vital knowledge with them to a
younger generation of workers impacts on organisations as they seek to transfer critical knowledge and
experience. Creating effective solutions for capturing and transferring this knowledge impacts right across an
organisation bringing together HR strategies for retention and acquisition, systems for effective knowledge
capture and transfer, and change management for ensuring that approaches are accepted and implemented
across the workforce. This paper provides a framework for assessing the impact across seven business areas
covering strategic, HR, IT and operational aspects. It is used as a high level tool within an organisation to assess
their current approaches to generational shift, identify areas of concern and opportunity, and develop effective
knowledge capture and transfer systems for an organisation. It can also be used to drive pilot schemes for testing
approaches in critical areas of the organisation.
Acknowledgement
“Lost Knowledge” by David De Long, Oxford University Press, 2004 has been a major source of information that I
have used to define the Knowledge Map described in this document. It is well worth a read.
Not Just a Problem of the Ageing Workforce
The baby boomer phenomenon has impacted society for the sixty years. The majority of those over the
age of 55 will exit the workforce over the next decade, some taking with them significant knowledge
vital to success of a business. This is exacerbated by a shrinking pool of skilled younger workers and
the problems of transferring knowledge and experience to them.
HR teams are taking significant steps to manage the flow of exiting workers with valuable domain
knowledge and expertise and to compete for top quality new talent. However this leaves the equally
difficult problem of enabling these new workers to become productive quickly when there are fewer
experienced experts on whom to rely. This includes creating solutions for capturing and transferring
knowledge and know-how that depend both on technologies and on the needs and motivations of
groups including the older workforce and the younger staff; the latter having significantly different
approaches to learning and skill development.
Retaining and transferring explicit knowledge, “know-how”, beliefs and intuition is already critical for
some organisations and, for others, will soon become a major issue as the costs and threats to the
business grow leading to, for example:
 Disruption in the business as operational know-how is lost;
 Adverse impact on existing cost reduction initiatives as staff experienced in running
efficient processes are lost;
 Loss of competitive advantage to rivals who have developed approaches to transfer
knowledge;
 Inability to develop new services, to take advantage of R&D, or to re-start major
initiatives;
 Inability to adapt to more complex operational, regulatory and trading situations.
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Generational shift
Bringing the elements together
There is often no clear ownership of the problem as it crosses all functions of the organisation. HR is
involved in developing acquisition and retention plans; IT managers own the enabling technology to
drive knowledge capture and sharing systems; functional, line and project managers must create the
values and culture to drive the behaviours needed to share, capture, and use the knowledge. A
comprehensive solution includes senior management, the older workforce, mid career professionals,
new recruits, line managers, project managers, HR, Finance and, potentially, external suppliers.
A starting point is a short evaluation of the current organisation and readiness for introducing
knowledge capture and transfer as part of addressing generational shift. We use the framework below
with an organisation, or area within an organisation, to look at the impact in several areas.
1. How effectively does business strategy and planning reflect the impacts of generational
shift? This is concerned with the impact of generational shift on the business and on the wide set of
users impacted by any proposed solution. It looks at how the approaches adopted by the company
to generational shift are aligned against the business strategy and to likely changes in business
drivers. It reviews how advanced and integrated are the plans of different parts of the organisation.
In particular, it asks: how well are HR policies aligned with knowledge sharing practice and
supporting. IT systems?
2. How will the business create and continue to create value from the knowledge and expertise
in the company? This develops a “Knowledge Map” for the organisation and, with managers,
identifies where the organisation is most vulnerable to lost knowledge and which knowledge is
critical within the context of the business’ strategy. It considers the impact of HR’s acquisition plans
for new staff and retention plans for existing staff. It also looks at the needs of a number of internal
and external groups affected by or having an influence on generational shift. This is used to
measure the value and benefits of proposed general shift services to each impacted group and the
balance of the value to the customer against the value to the organisation of introducing services
around generational shift. This forms the basis for prioritising and specifying solutions and is the
core of a Benefits Realisation Plan against which to measure the impact of the overall programme.
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Generational shift
3. What knowledge and expertise capture & transfer services are employed? One solution to
knowledge loss is to simply "write it all down." However, this approach is not well suited to retain all
types of knowledge. The Knowledge Map is used to identify and classify critical knowledge and
expertise areas. These include explicit knowledge that is easily structured, captured, stored, and
shared in electronic or paper documents. Tacit knowledge includes skills such as beliefs, images,
intuition and “know how” that are less easily codified and captured. This map is compared against
the existing use of standard approaches such a documentation, interviews and training together
with techniques appropriate for tacit knowledge such as mentoring, project and work reviews, living
case studies and encouraging codes of practice
4. What systems and processes are employed to support the capture & transfer of knowledge?
This looks at the use of systems underpinning knowledge transfer solutions that connect less
experienced employees with experts, accelerate learning though collaboration, e-learning, technical
questions databases and problem solving, capture knowledge by collecting, organising and sharing
knowledge, and map knowledge though, for example, expert locator systems such as “Corporate
Yellow Pages”. Increasingly social media approaches such as Facebook and Linkedin are being
considered for internal use and should be considered as part of the mix.
5. What technologies are needed to deliver knowledge capture & transfer? To capture and
deliver structured knowledge there are several possible underlying technologies for electronic
documentation, databases of lessons learnt and case studies and web based repositories. To
manage the tacit knowledge there are emerging technologies using private social networking to
support communities and remote mentoring. This looks at the use of these technologies and the
match with the strategic needs of the organisation;
6. What is the impact on the workforce of introducing knowledge capture & transfer initiatives?
To ensure take up of these services means understanding and reacting to employee engagement
and motivation, rewards and incentives. This includes consideration of a behavioural and attitude
changes in the organisation and the skill development that is needed to take full advantage of the
generational shift solution. In particular it reflects the difference between the approaches of the
older workforce and the younger staff; the latter generally want to learn by doing and getting
feedback on their efforts, rather than by listening or reading and use formats such as interactive
video or computer simulations;
7. How will the organisation measure the effectiveness of knowledge capture & transfer
programmes? This covers for example, Benefits Realisation for the system, as well as dashboards
monitoring the use of the knowledge transfer services by different user groups and the performance
of support teams, such as the call centre or technical help desk, in delivering the service.
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Generational shift
TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE & KNOW HOW
Explicit
knowledge
Implicit
Knowledge
Implicit Know-how
Individual’s Tacit
Know How
Community
Knowledge
Easily structured
knowledge that
can be captured,
stored and shared
in electronic or
paper form
Explicit knowledge
that has not yet been
captured
Eg When an
experienced worker
uses a shortcut in an
established process
Knowledge that an
individual or group can
readily communicate, but
is difficult to codify as it
involves experience or
contextual knowledge.
Can be transferred if the
expert is asked the right
questions
Very difficult for
expert to verbalise &
transfer to others. Eg
When to close deal.
Contains a lot of
expert’s experience
Collectively shared
beliefs, mental
models and values.
The most difficult to
access
CAPTURING & TRANSFERRING KNOWLEDGE
Explicit
Implicit
Documents
Interviews
Training
Mentoring
&
coaching
After action
reviews / case
studies
Community of
practice
Stored in on
paper or
electronic
databases to be
accesses by
future
successors
Face-to-face
between older
employees &
successors. More
direct transfer of
broader type of
explicit, implicit &
some tacit
knowledge.
Successors can ask
questions for
clarification etc
Packaged into
training
packages for
wider
audiences.
Trainees can’t
question
original expert
to test veracity
of knowledge
Shares
broadest
range of
knowledge
and allows
individual to
gauge how
knowledge is
being
absorbed
Brief summaries to
retain and re-use
knowledge during
ongoing
operations. Helps
improve transfer of
knowledge as
pertinent to current
or future
operations
Links & promotes
common interest
groups into
networks for
knowledge
sharing and
problem solving
across
organisation
KNOWLEDGE CAPTURE & TRANSFER SOLUTIONS & SYSTEMS
Knowledge Locators
People connectors
Maps where knowledge lies in
organisation for better management
of HR assets
Links less experienced employees with
experts
Knowledge capture
Expert locator / Corporate Yellow
Pages
Allowing employees to search for
colleagues / alumni with relevant
knowledge / experience
Collect & organise critical
documentation using web-based
searchable repositories
Enterprise content management
systems
Internal social networking
with web based applications to build
communities of interest [eg employee
only Linkedin]
Technical document database
Legacy databases
Learning accelerators
Intensify collaboration between experts &
less experienced staff through
communications, e-mail, file sharing,
document management, messaging,
electronic whiteboards, conferencing
Apply e-learning through web based
systems delivering continuum of learning /
events / expert systems to embed human
expertise into systems. Web based
diagnostic & predictive tools.
Support problem solving allowing experts
to be more explicit about thinking processes
and knowledge through Question based
reasoning, lessons learnt databases and
technical questions databases
IT TECHNOLOGY & INFRASTRUCTURE
Capture
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Store
Retrieve
Share
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Generational shift
Taking the pulse of your organisation
Using this framework, we develop checklists that test the maturity if an organisation and their current explicit or
implicit approaches to generational shift programmes that can be used in several ways:

As a quick senior management overview by asking a cross section of the organisation to mark the level of
their agreement against a set of statements as illustrated on the next page. The scores are aggregated to
provide an overall maturity score and one for each of the key areas of the framework. The assessment
identifies areas of strength and weakness and can be repeated at regular intervals to monitor an
organisation’s progress towards taking full competitive advantage of generational shift. We find that a survey
of around 25-30 questions administered across an organisation will give an initial assessment of the
readiness of an organisation to develop and introduce services designed for the ageing workforce.

As part of a formal review over a few weeks conducted with a cross section of the organisation
to evaluate the current and proposed approaches. This is combined with research to identify
knowledge management best practices and key trends relevant to that organisation and industry.
Online surveys, stakeholder interviews and experiential workshops can provide insights into the
drivers, barriers, and benefits of knowledge retention, and identified knowledge retention
strategies and tools to be validated. The results are used to develop, with senior management, an
integrated plan and outline business case for further development

For setting up and driving pilot programmes: With support of senior management, this forms
the basis for setting up pilot programmes to test and develop new approaches with the greatest
likelihood of success, together with a measure of their effectiveness
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Generational shift
Sample Statements to Assess Generational Shift Maturity of an Organisation
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Senior management understands and have put corporate objectives in place for addressing
generational shift that are reflected in the operational plans of each department
We have an understanding of the risks, costs and opportunities on our business arising from the
ageing workforce and generational shift
We understand the profile of where knowledge exists across our business, the type of knowledge, the
groups of people with whom this knowledge resides and the key risks this generates
We have put in place HR strategies for acquiring new staff and retaining key experienced staff that
reflect the business needs of the organisation
My organisation understand the needs, motivators and inhibitors of the key groups of employees and
external groups affected by or influencing approaches for generational shift
We understand the prioritised benefits and the value to each group of introducing general shift
programmes into the organisation
We employ a broad range of knowledge transfer processes and practices (e.g., communities of
practice, after action reviews, documentation systems, etc.) resulting in a high degree of collaboration
and knowledge sharing across generations
We understand the attitudes and preferences of each employee group for using digital and other
technologies for learning, education and communications
We have knowledge transfer propositions in place for addressing generational shift based on the
needs & relative importance of different customer or business groups
We have identified and audited our current applications and processes that may be of value for
developing HR and knowledge transfer services for generational shift
We have identified other applications and services that could be used in developing HR and
knowledge transfer services around generational shift
We have developed a top level map of the skills and expertise that are required to implement
generational shift programmes in the organisation
We have communications and change management plans in place with groups of employees and
external stakeholders for ensuring that the culture exists for the positive take up of knowledge transfer
solutions;
We have a draft Benefits Realisation Framework in place for capturing benefits to the organisation
and key customer groups
There are metrics, milestones and checkpoints in place to assess regularly progress and make
adjustments
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Generational shift
Advantages of the Approach
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Engages across the organisation to ensure that the policies and approaches towards
generational shift are agreed and accepted by all functions;
Identifies the teams in an organisation and externally that need to be engaged to ensure
successful delivery of knowledge transfer;
Leads to an integrated and phased set of solutions for generational shift and creates a road map
for service introduction
Identifies benefit areas for use as key messages in communications and as the basis for Benefits
Realisation programmes;
Leads to higher levels of acceptance by different users in an organisation since it is built around
their needs;
Creates a framework against which to define and evaluate technology and infrastructure
solutions;
Identifies where change management, communication and education are required and the key
messages on which to base them;
“Future-proofs” against changes in customer and stakeholder preferences and the impact of new
digital technologies;
Supports design and launch processes through a full set of checklists to assess progress at every
stage from concept through to business-as-usual.
Key sources
1. “Lost Knowledge” by David De Long, Oxford University Press, 2004
2. “Handbook of CRM” by Adrian Payne, Cranfield School of Management, Elsevier, 2006
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